The Guilty Pleasure of Unread Books
I read somewhere that around 30% of the books on the shelves of most keen readers are unread and will probably remain unread. I definitely fit into that category. It’s not greed or a desire to show off. Well, perhaps it is a tiny bit of both, but it is also a form of insurance I can call upon when needed. It is the comfort of knowing I am only a couple of metres away from a gorgeous accessible affluence of words.
I hope one day I will be in the mood for George Gissing’s The Nether World, the 1889 ‘fast-moving story of highly dramatic, sometimes violent, scenes depicting the life of…slum-dwellers in Clerkenwell’. Some day I might want to explore A Writer’s Britain with Margaret Drabble and if I ever have the urge to hide the water rings left on an old table Practical Decoupage is waiting for me.
There is a word for it in Japanese, tsundoku. (I found out how to pronounce it here. I wonder if I can remember long enough to wrangle it into a conversation.)
What’s on your unread pile? The classics, like Robert Service in the poem below? Self Help books you are not yet sufficiently motivated to open? A cuckoo of novel that seems to have appeared on your book shelf from nowhere?
| BOOK LOVER By Robert Service |
| I keep collecting books I know I’ll never, never read; My wife and daughter tell me so, And yet I never heed. “Please make me,” says some wistful tome, “A wee bit of yourself.” And so I take my treasure home, And tuck it in a shelf. And now my very shelves complain; They jam and over-spill. They say: “Why don’t you ease our strain?” “Some day,” I say, “I will.” So book by book they plead and sigh; I pick and dip and scan; Then put them back, distressed that I Am such a busy man. Now, there’s my Boswell and my Sterne, my Gibbon and Defoe; To savor Swift I’ll never learn, Montaigne I may not know. On Bacon I will never sup, For Shakespeare I’ve no time; Because I’m busy making up These jingly bits of rhyme. Chekov is caviar to me, While Stendhal makes me snore; Poor Proust is not my cup of tea, And Balzac is a bore. I have their books, I love their names, And yet alas! they head, With Lawrence, Joyce and Henry James, My Roster of Unread. I think it would be very well If I commit a crime, And get put in a prison cell And not allowed to rhyme; Yet given all these worthy books According to my need, I now caress with loving looks, But never, never read. |
2 comments on “The Guilty Pleasure of Unread Books”
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"Unputdownable" Miriam Stoppard
BRIDGET WHELAN writer 
I love being surrounded by my stacks of books, yet to read. they give me comfort in knowing they are there and ready when I am and no rush to get to them
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I do hope you get to read George Gissing’s The Nether World, Bridget. It’s brilliant. One of my Novel as Social History course books a while ago. Gissing’s other books are also worth a read. I’m always recommending The Odd Women.
Re unread books. I think I may have more than 30%! Some of my wonderful history books are partly read. Bought when teaching a particular era, then………
S
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